› Forums › Variable Stars › Nova in Perseus › Visual observation last night
I had visuals on it last night from 22:15 hours to 23:15 hours. It was a balancing act between the sky getting darker as astro dark approached (22:58) but getting brighter as the almost full moon rose higher (moonrise 21:52) combined with target getting lower! I first detected it (surprisingly) in 7 x 50 binoculars just getting to grips with the field as I was going to use small fully manual scopes on Alt-Az mounts so I could move around to clear horizon obstacles. I then switched to a 72mm ED with full erecting prism and various powers starting off with a 24mm Panoptic giving x18 with a 3.8 deg FOV. I then switched to an Intes-Micro Alter 500 127mm F10 Mak-Cass for more light gathering. I didn’t see the mag 9.3 star (SAO39704) very near to it in the bins but I did in the 72mm and 127mm scopes. It was much brighter than the mag 9.3 star and I thought it had a hint of a red tint to it but very difficult to be sure on faint-ish objects. I then compared it to nearby stars SAO 39724 (mag 7.26) and SAO 39696 (mag 7.97), these were the two stars at the bottom of the Rhombus pattern. It wasn’t quite as bright as the m7.26 star but brighter than the 7.97, I put it at a 1/3 to 2/3 so estimated the brightness of V392 at mag 7.50.
Great fun, Andrew